Another way to look at it is that signing up shows I'm a potential customer and if they want my biz they need to place a location near me. If I pay now they have no incentive (and I probably wouldn't use so wouldn't pay anyway). Seems natural Westport/Plaza area will be next nevertheless. And I would use it for airport runs, cheaper than Uber more timely than bus.

^I suspected, don't know of anyone downtown using it. Seems perfect for airport and suburban runs. Uber seems to have a stronghold in KC. Get with it downtowners so that it can expand. Use it or lose it.

They didn't start big enough. You're not going to rely on it if you can't count on a car being there.As of this post there's six cars downtown, one at UMKC and one at the airport. So at this point, citywide eight people can use the service.

In NYC they have 3000 cars, a car roughly per 3000 peopleKC has a car roughly per 57,000 people. So our network is 20x smaller per capita.

If they had brought 30 or 40 cars to downtown KC I expect use would be a lot higher because most people wouldn't need to hop on a bus to rent a car with them since they could have been spread out more.

NYC of course has a huge % with no car, including avg to even upper income. In KC a huge % still own a car even in city, including many below avg income. Uber is useful on the spot even for those who own a car, Zipcar is pretty much for those who don't have car at all and Zip's target audience is not lower income who would ride bus and not consider Zipcar.

Would suspect those in the middle are so ingrained into Uber they'd stick with it rather than use Zipcar. But there are cases where Zipcar is cheaper and more effective use than Uber, such as suburban and airport runs. Frankly it would be only time I'd use it.

But good to see Zipcar sees enough biz to add the 9th/McGee spot. STL has zero downtown, just airport, which is odd.

Zipcar would be the perfect company to implement self driving cars for one way trips. A person takes zipcar from Downtown to Airport then the zipcar self drives back to its original spot, it would be the ideal first business to use self driving cars because there would be no human risk in any of it and it would make the company more efficient

^Uber is attempting this but a self-driving crash seemed to slow it down. Still ahead of its time I guess. Until AI is mastered enough, might be a while.

Uber/Lyft could kill Zip by doing a subscription hybrid. Uber has been testing a monthly subscription in some cities with reduced fares per ride. That could effectively make Zipcar unnecessary depending on how final numbers work out for long hauls, and the car comes to you.

brewcrew1000 wrote:Zipcar would be the perfect company to implement self driving cars for one way trips. A person takes zipcar from Downtown to Airport then the zipcar self drives back to its original spot, it would be the ideal first business to use self driving cars because there would be no human risk in any of it and it would make the company more efficient